In quotes: Margaret Thatcher - BBC News BBC News Close share panel Media captionMargaret Thatcher in her own words Baroness Thatcher was seldom one to hold back her views. Here are some of the things she said - and which were said about her. CONVICTION POLITICIAN "I love argument. I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me - that's not their job." 1980 "I am not a consensus politician. I'm a conviction politician." 1979 "I don't mind how much my ministers talk, as long as they do what I say." 1980 "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope." Quoting St Francis of Assisi, on her 1979 election victory. "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to.

The lady's not for turning." 10 October 1980, Conservative party conference SPEAKING HER MIND "Nobody would remember the Good Samaritan if he had only good intentions. He had money as well." 1980 "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty." On the 1984-85 miners' strike "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." 1987 WOMAN IN A MAN'S WORLD "No woman in my time will be prime minister or foreign secretary - not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn't want to be prime minister.

You have to give yourself 100% to the job." 1969, in opposition as Conservative MP for Finchley "Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country." 1979, the year she became prime minister "We have become a grandmother." On the birth of her first grandchild, 1989 ON EUROPE "We are not asking for a penny piece of Community money for Britain. What we are asking is for a very large amount of our own money back." At the European Union summit in Dublin, 1979 "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels." 1988 "No! No!

No!" House of Commons 20 October 1990, the climax of an anti-European outburst that moved Geoffrey Howe to quit as deputy prime minister and deliver the resignation speech calling for her to be challenged for her job THE END OF THE AFFAIR "I fight on, I fight to win." 21 November 1990, after failing to win enough votes to avoid a second round in the Tory leadership contest. She resigned the next day "It's a funny old world." 27 November 1990, at her last cabinet meeting "It was treachery with a smile on its face. Perhaps that was the worst thing of all." 1993, on the cabinet colleagues who had advised her to stand down. LIFE AFTER OFFICE "Home is where you come to when you've got nothing better to do." May 1991, six months after leaving Number 10 ...AND WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT HER "She has the eyes of Caligula but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe." French President Francois Mitterrand "She was always an attractive woman.

She had not merely a film star's attractiveness; she could also behave like a film star when she chose to do so." Sir Bernard Ingham, her Downing Street press secretary "This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated." ICI personnel department assessment, rejecting job application from the then Margaret Roberts in 1948 Margaret Thatcher, 87; prime minister remade England - The Boston Globe Advertisement Lady Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, 18 months before her friend Ronald Reagan was elected president. Deng Xiaoping, John Paul II, and, later, Mikhail Gorbachev may have played a more significant role in the worldwide rightward shift that marked the final quarter of the 20th century. None, however, more clearly symbolized that shift, or worked more enthusiastically to further it, than Reagan and Lady Thatcher. Johnny Eggitt/AFP/Getty Images/File 1989 Lady Thatcher acknowledged applause at the end of the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool in 1989. “I am not a consensus politician,” she announced upon assuming leadership of the Conservative Party, in February 1975.

“I am a conviction politician.” Lady Thatcher’s convictions — in favor of free-market economics and Victorian values, against state socialism and personal permissiveness — were deeply polarizing (something she readily, even proudly admitted) and flew in the face of several decades of British politics. “There is no such thing as society,” she said in 1987, indicating her commitment to the primacy of the individual and markets. Before Lady Thatcher came to power, postwar Britain had been defined by “Butskellism,” as it was called, after two leading politicians of the 1950s, the Conservative Rab Butler and the Laborite Hugh Gaitskell. The term stood for a tacit agreement on the need for government intervention in economic and social policy to provide for the common good. “Thatcherism,” the only -ism ever named for a British prime minister, rejected that consensus. It counted among its achievements privatizing such state-run enterprises as British Airways and Rolls-Royce, tripling the number of Britons who owned stock, and increasing home ownership by more than 25 percent.

Critics, however, cited unemployment levels during the early 1980s not seen since the Great Depression and an unprecedented fraying of the nation’s social fabric. Thatcherism was as much about style as policy. As proudly middle class as its namesake, it disdained aristocratic snobbery as well as working-class egalitarianism. Thatcherism was about getting things done rather than getting along or going along. The taste for irony and understatement evinced by such Conservative predecessors as Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home was utterly alien to Lady Thatcher. Defiantly impolitic, she said what she meant — and said it bluntly. “I always found the most effective weapon was ‘No’ or sometimes ‘No, No, No!’ ’’ she said in her maiden speech to the House of Lords. AFP/Getty Images/File 1980 Lady Thatcher attended the Franco-British summit in Paris. Lady Thatcher’s blend of candor and assertiveness entranced supporters and enraged opponents. Unlike Reagan, whose affability helped make his policies popular, she earned a reputation for inflexibility, stridency, and arrogance. Rather than regretting such an image, Lady Thatcher seemed to revel in it.

“I think sometimes the prime minister should be intimidating,” she once said. “There’s not much point being a weak, floppy thing in the chair, is there?” Lady Thatcher’s forceful manner and disdain for compromise proved crucial in two of her greatest triumphs: Britain’s victory over Argentina in the Falklands War, in 1982; and the nationwide coal strike that began in March 1984 and ended with the crushing of the miners union a year later. Further complicating her image was her sex. “She is so clearly the best man among them,” wrote a Laborite minister, Barbara Castle, upon Lady Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader. The choice of noun was apt as well as pointed. Lady Thatcher had learned early on that she could ill afford to seem weak in what she once described as the “noisy, boisterous, masculine world” of the House of Commons.

In a statement Monday, Meryl Streep, who won a best actress Academy Award for playing Lady Thatcher in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady,” spoke of being in awe of “her personal strength and grit.” Streep noted that Lady Thatcher gave “women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation.” Lady Thatcher’s being a woman proved, in some respects, even more asset than liability. It lent her a special fascination, something felt not just by voters and Conservative MPs but other world leaders. Pondering Lady Thatcher’s capacity to combine fierceness and femininity, President Francois Mitterrand of France observed, “She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Or as pop star Geri Halliwell put it, “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology — Girl Power.” Caligula, Marilyn, Spice Girl: Lady Thatcher was unlike any other resident of 10 Downing Street, before or since. As she wrote in her memoirs, “My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister.

I was less able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change.” Born in Grantham, England, on Oct. 13, 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts was the second daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and lay Methodist minister, and Beatrice Roberts, a dressmaker. As Lady Thatcher never tired of reminding voters, she grew up “above the shop,” in an apartment that lacked indoor plumbing and hot water. The most important influence on Lady Thatcher was her father. From him, she obtained both her love of politics (a town councilor, he later became Grantham’s mayor) and strong sense of self. Lady Thatcher excelled at school and won a scholarship to Oxford University. She majored in chemistry and was the first female president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduating, in 1947, Lady Thatcher spent four years working as a research chemist (she later became a lawyer). Lady Thatcher ran for Parliament in 1950 and ’51 in a solidly Labor district. She lost both times, but drew the attention of Conservative Party leaders.

She interrupted her political career to marry Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman 10 years her senior, in December 1951. His genial, unemphatic personality would prove an ideal complement to her driven, sometimes-intemperate manner. “Typical of Margaret,” Thatcher remarked after his wife gave birth to a son and daughter, Mark and Carol, in 1953. “She produced twins . . . and avoided the necessity of a second pregnancy.” Sir Denis Thatcher died in 2003. Elected to Parliament in 1959, Lady Thatcher was given a minor Cabinet position just two years later. She held various posts in the Conservative shadow Cabinet while the party was out of office, from 1964 to 1970, in such major ministries as energy, transportation, and education. She was the only woman in Edward Heath’s Cabinet. Dissatisfaction with Heath was growing after Labor’s victory in 1974. When more prominent party figures shrank from opposing him, Lady Thatcher stepped forward. She led her party to victory in May 1979, gaining a 43-seat majority in Parliament.

Lady Thatcher’s efforts to curb inflation and cut taxes met with success. They also led to a doubling of unemployment. As criticism of her policies mounted in 1980, Lady Thatcher declared, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only this to say. ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’ ” By late 1981, she had the lowest popularity rating ever recorded in a public opinion poll for a British prime minister. Yet two developments came to her rescue. At home, Labor moved further left and the emergence of the new center-left party, the Social Democrats, helped splinter opposition. Abroad, in 1982, Argentina seized the British-controlled Falkland Islands. Lady Thatcher’s popularity soared with her steadfast leadership during the victorious 10-week military conflict that followed. “Great Britain is great again,” she proclaimed. Calling for elections in June 1983, Lady Thatcher led the Conservatives to a 144-seat majority in Parliament. Four years later, Conservatives won a 102-seat majority. Yet many senior Conservatives had grown restive under Lady Thatcher’s rule.

Further weakening her popularity was widespread opposition to a poll tax and the privatizing of water and electrical utilities. In addition, her growing criticism of European Community policy set the stage for efforts to overturn her leadership. The first, in 1989, proved unsuccessful. The second, in November 1990, did not. Lady Thatcher’s backing of John Major had proved crucial in his selection as her successor. He was far from being a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite, and his predecessor grew increasingly critical of him. In 1997, Lady Thatcher was widely quoted as saying of Major’s Labor opponent, “Tony [Blair] won’t let us down.” By 1998, though, she was saying of Blair (who had won a landslide victory two years before), “I’m worried about that young man, he’s getting awfully bossy.” In addition to her children, Lady Thatcher leaves two grandchildren. A sister, Muriel, died in 2004. A ceremonial funeral will be held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London next week. Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com .

Top 10 Trending Articles Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died - The Boston Globe Advertisement Lady Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, 18 months before her friend Ronald Reagan was elected president. Deng Xiaoping, John Paul II, and, later, Mikhail Gorbachev may have played a more significant role in the worldwide rightward shift that marked the final quarter of the 20th century. None, however, more clearly symbolized that shift, or worked more enthusiastically to further it, than Reagan and Lady Thatcher. “I am not a consensus politician,” she announced upon assuming leadership of the Conservative Party, in February 1975. “I am a conviction politician.” Lady Thatcher’s convictions — in favor of free-market economics and Victorian values, against state socialism and personal permissiveness — were deeply polarizing (something she readily, even proudly admitted) and flew in the face of several decades of British politics. “There is no such thing as society,” she said in 1987, indicating her commitment to the primacy of the individual and markets.

Prior to Lady Thatcher’s coming to power, postwar Britain had been defined by “Butskellism,” as it was called, after two leading politicians of the 1950s, the Conservative Rab Butler and the Laborite Hugh Gaitskell. The term stood for a tacit agreement on the need for government intervention in economic and social policy to provide for the common good. “Thatcherism,” the only ism ital ever named for a British prime minister, rejected that consensus. It counted among its achievements privatizing such state-run enterprises as British Airways and Rolls-Royce, tripling the number of Britons who owned stock, and increasing home ownership by more than 25 percent. Critics, however, cited unemployment levels during the early ’80s not seen since the Great Depression and an unprecedented fraying of the nation’s social fabric. Thatcherism was as much about style as policy. As proudly middle class as its namesake, it disdained aristocratic snobbery as well as working-class egalitarianism. Thatcherism was about getting things done rather than getting along or going along.

The taste for irony and understatement evinced by such Conservative predecessors as Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home was utterly alien to Lady Thatcher. Defiantly impolitic, she said what she meant — and said it bluntly. “I always found the most effective weapon was ‘No’ or sometimes ‘No, No, No!,’“ she said in her maiden speech to the House of Lords. Lady Thatcher’s blend of candor and assertiveness entranced supporters and enraged opponents. Unlike Reagan, whose affability helped make his policies popular, she earned a reputation for inflexibility, stridency, and arrogance. Rather than regretting such an image, Lady Thatcher seemed to revel in it. “I think sometimes the prime minister should be intimidating,” she once said. “There’s not much point being a weak, floppy thing in the chair, is there?” Lady Thatcher’s forceful manner and disdain for compromise proved crucial in two of her greatest triumphs: Britain’s victory over Argentina in the Falklands War, in 1982; and the nationwide coal strike that began in March 1984 and ended with the crushing of the miners’ union a year later. Further complicating Lady Thatcher’s image was her sex.

“She is so clearly the best man among them,” wrote a Laborite minister, Barbara Castle, upon Lady Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader. The choice of noun was apt as well as pointed. Lady Thatcher had learned early on that she could ill afford to seem weak in what she once described as the “noisy, boisterous, masculine world” of the House of Commons. In a statement Monday, Meryl Streep, who won a best actress Academy Award for playing Lady Thatcher in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady,” spoke of being in “awe” of “her personal strength and grit.” Streep noted that Lady Thatcher gave “women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation.” Lady Thatcher’s being a woman proved, in some respects, even more asset than liability. It lent her a special fascination, something felt not just by voters and Conservative MPs but other world leaders.

Pondering Lady Thatcher’s capacity to combine fierceness and femininity, French President Francois Mitterrand observed, “She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Or as pop star Geri Halliwell put it, “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology — Girl Power.” Caligula, Marilyn, Spice Girl: Lady Thatcher was unlike any other resident of 10 Downing Street, before or since. As she wrote in her memoirs, “My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister. I was less able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change.” Born in Grantham, England, on Oct. 13, 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts was the second daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and lay Methodist minister, and Beatrice Roberts, a dressmaker. As Lady Thatcher never tired of reminding voters, she grew up “above the shop,” in an apartment that lacked both indoor plumbing and hot water.

“My ‘Bloomsbury,’ ” she once wrote, referring to the cultural hub of radicalism in the 1920s and ’30s, “was Grantham — Methodism, the grocer’s shop, Rotary and all the serious, sober virtues cultivated and esteemed in that environment.” The most important influence on Lady Thatcher was her father. From him, she obtained both her love of politics (a town councilor, he later became Grantham’s mayor) and strong sense of self. A favorite piece of advice, one much taken to heart, was “Never do things just because other people do them.” Lady Thatcher excelled at school and won a scholarship to Oxford University. She majored in chemistry and was the first female president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduating, in 1947, Lady Thatcher spent four years working as a research chemist (she later became a lawyer). Lady Thatcher ran for Parliament in 1950 and ’51 in a solidly Labor district. She lost both times, but drew the attention of Conservative Party leaders. She interrupted her political career to marry Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman 10 years her senior, in December 1951.

His genial, unemphatic personality would prove an ideal complement to her driven, sometimes-intemperate manner. “Typical of Margaret,” Thatcher remarked after his wife gave birth to a son and daughter, Mark and Carol, in 1953. “She produced twins … and avoided the necessity of a second pregnancy.” Sir Denis Thatcher died in 2003. Elected to Parliament in 1959, Lady Thatcher was given a minor Cabinet position just two years later. She held various posts in the Conservative shadow Cabinet while the party was out of office, from 1964 to 1970, in such major ministries as energy, transportation, and education. She was the only woman in Edward Heath’s Cabinet. As minister for education and science she drew criticism for eliminating free milk for schoolchildren, earning her the sobriquet “Thatcher the milk snatcher.” Dissatisfaction with Heath was growing after Labor’s victory in 1974. When more prominent party figures shrank from opposing him, Lady Thatcher stepped forward. She led her party to victory in May 1979, gaining a 43-seat majority in Parliament.

Lady Thatcher’s efforts to curb inflation and cut taxes met with success. They also led to a doubling of unemployment. As criticism of her policies mounted in 1980, Lady Thatcher declared, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only this to say. ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’“ By late 1981, she had the lowest popularity rating ever recorded in a public opinion poll for a British prime minister. Yet two developments came to Lady Thatcher’s rescue. At home, Labor moved further left and the emergence of new center-left party, the Social Democrats, helped splinter opposition. Abroad, in 1982, Argentina seized the Falkland Islands. Lady Thatcher’s popularity soared with her steadfast leadership during the victorious 10-week military conflict that followed. “Great Britain is great again,” she proclaimed. Calling for elections in June 1983, Lady Thatcher led the Conservatives to a 144-seat majority in Parliament. Four years later, Conservatives won a 102-seat majority. Yet many senior Conservatives had grown restive under Lady Thatcher’s rule.

Further weakening her popularity was widespread opposition to a poll tax and the privatizing of water and electrical utilities. In addition, her growing criticism of European Community policy — especially the prospect of British participation in the European Monetary System — set the stage for efforts to overturn her leadership. The first, in 1989, proved unsuccessful. The second, in Nov. 1990, did not. Lady Thatcher’s backing of John Major had proved crucial in his selection as her successor. He was far from being a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite, and his predecessor grew increasingly critical of him. In 1997, Lady Thatcher was widely quoted as saying of Major’s Labor opponent, “Tony [Blair] won’t let us down.” By 1998, though, she was saying of Blair (who had won a landslide victory two years before), “I’m worried about that young man, he’s getting awfully bossy.” Still, it might be that the greatest tribute paid to Lady Thatcher was the way in which Blair, rather than rejecting Thatcherism, did his best to present himself as carrying on its tradition of forward-looking vigor and entrepreneurial optimism. In addition to her children, Lady Thatcher leaves two grandchildren.

A sister, Muriel, died in 2004. A ceremonial funeral will be held at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral next week. Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com . Top 10 Trending Articles Europe and Baroness Thatcher: The great divide - BBC News BBC News Close share panel Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Over the years, Margaret Thatcher became viscerally opposed to handing over more sovereignty to Europe Europe's leaders both resented her and admired her. Francois Mitterrand said she had "the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe". Another French President Jacques Chirac said: "She was one of the most feared figures on the international stage." He went on to say: "What made her great in my view was above all her conviction... She never doubted being in the right." At the same time he once asked about Margaret Thatcher: "What does she want from me, this housewife? My balls on a plate?" The caricature of Margaret Thatcher was of a UK prime minister constantly "hand-bagging" other European leaders.

The story was often told of her attending a summit in 1984, banging the table, and demanding: "I want my money back." She fought fiercely for a British rebate, but she actually said: "We are simply asking to have our own money back." 'Greatest folly' There were, however, many sides to Margaret Thatcher's relationship with Europe. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, she was opposed to German reunification. Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor at the time, recalls her saying: "We beat the Germans twice and now they're back." Image copyright AFP We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising new dominance from Brussels Baroness Thatcher In time she understood that Germany could not remain divided and supported the need to embed the new Germany inside Europe and its institutions. She became a strong supporter of eastern and central European countries joining the European Union. So today the current German Chancellor Angela Merkel recalled her as "one of the greatest leaders in world politics of her time.

The freedom of the individual was at the centre of her beliefs so she recognised very early the power of the movements for freedom in Eastern Europe... I will never forget her contribution in overcoming Europe's division and the end of the Cold War." Margaret Thatcher was a strong supporter of the single market in Europe and signed the Single European Act. Her critics say that she saw the benefits of an open market but failed to appreciate that the management of that market would inevitably lead to handing over of some sovereignty. What she opposed was using the single market as a stepping stone to closer political union. In her keynote speech on Europe, delivered in Bruges in September 1988, she said: "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising new dominance from Brussels." That became the great divide. Many of Europe's leaders were committed to closer integration. They believed in it, with the single market but a staging post. Margaret Thatcher became viscerally opposed to handing over more sovereignty. In her book Statecraft, she described the European Union as "perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era".

The former Czech President Vaclav Klaus - and an avowed Thatcherite - said: "Many of us will never forget her famous speech in Bruges, where she clearly said that the suppression of nation states and the concentration of power in Brussels will destroy Europe." It was her rejection of further integration at an EU summit in Rome that prompted a rebellion and resignations within her own cabinet and led eventually to her downfall. Divisions over Europe to this day have become embedded in the Tory party. Conviction politician On the whole, Europe's leaders have been warm with their tributes. Image copyright AFP Image caption Ex-French President Jacques Chirac said of Lady Thatcher that "she never doubted being in the right" French President Francois Hollande described her as "a great figure who left a profound mark on the history of her country". The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, described her as a "circumspect yet engaged player in the EU".

But he also added: "Her legacy has done much to shape the United Kingdom as we know it today, including the special role of the UK in the European Union that endures to this day." Britain's current ambivalence towards the EU is part of Margaret Thatcher's legacy: the totemic role of the rebate; the insistence on opt-outs; the belief in British exceptionalism; the profound unease at power slipping away to a bureaucracy in Brussels. Britain has never committed to the idea of Europe. It is indifferent to the dream of ever-closer union. It fears the weakening of its own power as more and more decisions are taken at a European level in Brussels. European officials recognise that it was Margaret Thatcher who shaped many of the UK's instincts towards Europe. They learnt early that Lady Thatcher was a conviction politician. She approached every meeting or summit with passionate intensity. Europe's leaders had built their project on compromise, on trade-offs, on bargaining. The first British woman prime minister came from a very different tradition; arguments were to be won.

Falklands: “The Sphinx and the curious case of the Iron Lady’s H-bomb” (memoirs of Mitterrand’s psychoanalyst) | Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2005 Nov 20 Su Commentary (Sunday Times) Falklands: “The Sphinx and the curious case of the Iron Lady’s H-bomb” (memoirs of Mitterrand’s psychoanalyst) Document type: Sunday Times , 20 November 2005 Journalist: John Follain, The Sunday Times Editorial comments: Themes: Defence (Falklands War 1982), Foreign policy (USA), Foreign policy (Western Europe - non - EU) The Sphinx and the curious case of the Iron Lady's H-bomb François Mitterrand took many secrets with him when he died 10 years ago, but now his most startling claim is revealed. John Follain reports It is May 7, 1982, shortly after 3.30pm. Ali Magoudi, a Parisian psychoanalyst, paces back and forth awaiting the secret arrival of his next patient — whose identity, if revealed, would set off an earthquake in French politics.

The figure who enters, 45 minutes late, is François Mitterrand, no less — the president of France. Magoudi discovers that his patient does not want to talk about his childhood or his dreams, but about Margaret Thatcher and the crisis over the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. “Excuse me,” Mitterrand begins, apologising for his late arrival. “I had a difference of opinion to settle with the Iron Lady. What an impossible woman, that Thatcher! “With her four nuclear submarines on mission in the southern Atlantic, she threatens to launch the atomic weapon against Argentina — unless I supply her with the secret codes that render deaf and blind the missiles we have sold to the Argentinians. Margaret has given me very precise instructions on the telephone.” The scene is the most striking in Magoudi’s book, Rendez-vous: The psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, which is to be published in France on Friday. An account of their meetings, which spanned 11 years from 1982 to 1993, it is by far the most revealing of a flurry of books preceding the 10th anniversary of Mitterrand’s death on January 8, 1996.

The psychoanalyst has assured his publisher that all the quotes attributed to Mitterrand are genuine, although he cannot vouch for the truth of what the president said. Magoudi never fathoms Mitterrand out enough to draw up a psychological profile. But in notes taken after their meetings, he writes of his patient’s near-mystical enjoyment of power, his paranoid tendencies, his “massive anxiety” and the way morbid images frequently crop up in his speech. The French are still fascinated by the socialist leader who ruled France for 14 years, and who so cultivated an aura of mystery he was nicknamed “le Sphinx”. Although he claimed to have brought morality into French politics, his legacy has been clouded by corruption scandals. Last month, seven of his former associates were convicted of invasion of privacy for their role in a phone-tapping operation that he orchestrated on spurious national security grounds. Imagine a Tony Blair, a George W Bush or a Vladimir Putin confiding to a psychoanalyst long-buried childhood memories; glimpses of his private life involving an estranged wife, a mistress and an illegitimate daughter; fears of illness and death; and the occasional state secret or state lie.

Magoudi says his book was ordered by Mitterrand himself, who knew he would not live to see it published. It is a bizarre, intimate and haunting testament. Above all, it throws a new light on the help Mitterrand gave to Thatcher — who, he famously said, “had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. IT WAS in early May 1982, after a year in power, that Mitterrand contacted Magoudi to ask him to become his therapist. The psychoanalyst accepted with reluctance: he didn’t relish the prospect of the secret service searching his study in the Marais district or curious courtiers bugging his telephone. The next day, on May 4, two French-manufactured Super Etendard planes of the Argentine airforce attacked HMS Sheffield, a destroyer in the British taskforce steaming to the Falkland islands. A wave-skimming Exocet missile hit the Sheffield amidships, killing 20 crew and injuring 24. The destroyer was scuttled and British naval commanders swiftly concluded that this French-made weapon was so effective that the entire operation to throw the Argentine occupiers out of the islands was at risk.

Mitterrand had already pledged co-operation to Thatcher. Jacques Attali, his former aide, wrote that the president called her on the day after the invasion and told her: “I am with you.” According to Attali, who acted as his interpreter, “she was stunned and did not expect it”. Mitterrand had come to her aid while her friend Ronald Reagan dithered. Now Magoudi adds a nuclear twist to this apparently selfless entente. He writes that the death toll on the stricken Sheffield did not appear to impress Mitterrand unduly. “In war, when there is one death, it is already a lot,” the president said as their therapy session got under way three days later. “But, after all, these soldiers were professionals. If they were serving on this destroyer, it’s because they were volunteers. When you do this kind of job, you don’t invoke the gods every time there is a small hitch.” Mitterrand added: “I express myself freely in telling you this. I won’t say it in public, of course.” In full flow, he told Magoudi that he had ordered the Exocet’s secrets to be handed over to the British at Thatcher’s insistence.

“She is furious,” he said. “She blames me personally for this new Trafalgar . . . I have been forced to yield. She has them now, the codes. If our customers find out that the French wreck the weapons they sell, it’s not going to reflect well on our exports. “I ask you to keep that to yourself. I’ve been told that psychoanalysts don’t know how to keep mum in town! Is that true?” Magoudi did not reply. Instead he asked: “How do you react to such an intransigent woman?” Mitterrand replied: “What do you expect? You can’t win a struggle against the insular syndrome of an unbridled Englishwoman. To provoke a nuclear war for small islands inhabited by three sheep who are as hairy as they are frozen! Fortunately I yielded to her. Otherwise, I assure you, the metallic index finger of the lady would press the button.” Magoudi wanted to know how his patient felt about being “symbolically emasculated”, as the psychoanalyst put it. “You mean that in the face of such aggressiveness you remain passive?” he asked. “I will have the last word,” Mitterrand replied.

“Her island, it’s me who will destroy it. Her island, I swear that soon it will no longer be one. I will take my revenge. I will tie England to Europe, despite its natural tendency for isolation. How? I will build a tunnel under the Channel. Yes. I will succeed where Napoleon III failed.” Clearly delighted with his vision, Mitterrand had no doubt he would persuade Thatcher to accept the tunnel. “I will flatter her shopkeeper spirit. I will tell her that the welding to the Continent will not cost the crown one kopeck. She will not resist this resonant argument.” What are we to make of this account? What we do know is that there were British nuclear weapons in the Falklands conflict zone. According to Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London, the British taskforce carried nuclear depth charges. But he said there was no intention to use them. A number of ships that had been on exercises off Gibraltar had been ordered to steam south with nuclear depth charges on board rather than use up precious time unloading them.

“The government was desperate to get them away from the taskforce but the delays this would have caused at a time when they were trying to make the biggest diplomatic impact meant they decided they had better take them,” Freedman said. “They put them in the safest places possible. There was no intention to use them, but they certainly went.” There have been no credible reports of Polaris nuclear-armed submarines in the area. But, two years after the war, the Labour party demanded an official inquiry into a report that Britain had sent a Polaris to Ascension Island, the staging post for the taskforce, to be on stand-by for a nuclear attack on the Argentine city of Cordoba if the war went badly. The retired admirals who had been in charge of the Royal Navy during the conflict denied the charge. Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, then chief of the defence staff, said a nuclear attack “never entered our remotest thoughts”. Admiral Henry Leach, chief of the naval staff at the time, said: “We did not contemplate a nuclear attack and did not make any even potentially preparatory moves for such action.” Was Thatcher bluffing Mitterrand? Or was he exaggerating her ruthlessness?

He certainly gave her the Exocet codes, despite the resistance of his ministers and military chiefs, who wanted to protect French secrets and would have been happy to see Britain humiliated. Investigations in the 1990s revealed that France provided Britain with a large amount of technical assistance. The most valuable information was on the Exocet’s homing radar. Officials of Aerospatiale, the manufacturer, denied having direct dealings with the British; but Aerospatiale was run by Jacques Mitterrand, the president’s brother, a fact that may have facilitated a quiet arrangement. Sir John Nott, defence minister during the Falklands war, revealed in his memoirs that the French also supplied aircraft similar to those sold to Argentina for British pilots to practise against. “In so many ways,” wrote Nott, a diehard Eurosceptic like Thatcher, “Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.” Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that the French president was “absolutely staunch” in his support. “I was to have many disputes with President Mitterrand in later years,” she wrote.

“But I never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support throughout the Falklands crisis.” Mitterrand’s own assessment of her was confided to Attali. “Of course it is only power that matters,” he said late one night in 1982. “You can do nothing without it. That’s why I admire Thatcher.” For all her exasperating behaviour over Europe, “a mutual trust united them”, Attali said on the release of a book of his conversations with Mitterrand in 1996. “There was a certain tension between them, but they had a relationship of seduction, the rapport of man-woman.” And, according to Attali, Mitterrand’s “Caligula” remark had been misquoted. He had actually said she had “the eyes of Stalin and the voice of Marilyn Monroe”. As for Mitterrand’s payback, the Channel tunnel, this agreement was sealed when Thatcher visited Paris in November 1984, two years after the Falklands war. Reports at the time spoke of a late-night session over whisky at the British ambassador’s residence in the rue de Faubourg St Honoré, where her doubts turned to an almost messianic belief in the project.

At 2am she drank a toast to Anglo-French co-operation. “We had to have another drink before we were allowed to go to bed,” the late Nick Ridley, who was transport secretary, recorded in his memoirs, “exhausted though we were.” The tunnel was meant to open in 1993 at a cost of £5 billion. In fact it limped into operation with a limited service in 1994 at £12 billion, and in its first year of operation lost £900m. Mitterrand had his revenge — although the tunnel has proved as much as a financial black hole for France as for Britain. Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French operating company, owes more than £6 billion. IN HIS book Magoudi provides other insights into the president’s secret and manipulative ways. He has kept secret the locations of some of their meetings but says their therapy sessions lasted for a total of 18 hours. They also met informally for lunch and sometimes travelled together, he says. At their first meeting, Mitterrand’s pale complexion and mummy-like pursed lips struck the therapist as signs of illness.

The president revealed he had prostate cancer — a secret that was to be kept from the French public for most of his years in power. “My doctors are categorical,” he said. “The shooting pain I felt behind the thigh is not a sciatica, which is what Claude Gubler (his doctor) told the press . . . I have a minuscule cancer which only men suffer from.” It had spread to the bone and Mitterrand doubted the efficacy of his medical treatment. He had consulted the astrologist Elizabeth Teissier, a former model and soft-porn actress, who had advised him to take no chances “given my current astral conjunction”. She had suggested he find a psychoanalyst to help him fight the cancer mentally. Mitterrand had picked Magoudi after asking intelligence agents to investigate him. “I have waited for this presidency and the pleasure it gives me for too long to allow myself to be manoeuvred by death,” Mitterrand told Magoudi. “Do you realise?

I have waited for more than 40 years before taking the place of Charles de Gaulle.” A prominent politician since the 1950s, Mitterrand had used the French socialist party as a vehicle for personal political survival during the long Gaullist ascendancy of the 1960s and 1970s. On arriving at the presidential Elysée Palace, he had immediately chosen de Gaulle’s former office for himself. “Today it’s me who speaks in the name of France,” he told Magoudi. “Every time I rejoice internally . . . You do not know the joy that the love coming from all the French gives you. You will never know the effects of that drug.” Mitterrand had a plan: “to act, a little; to speak, a great deal; to build, enormously; to travel, definitely”. He appealed to Magoudi to help him in the mental fight to live long enough to fulfil this goal. “From you I ask only one thing. Help me to gain time, the time to build the image that I wish to leave to history. I need more of it, of time.

A great deal.” After a few sessions, Mitterrand revealed to Magoudi the existence of his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, born in 1974 when he was 58. He said that for years he had no longer lived with Danielle, his wife. This was at a time when all of France save for a few intimate friends of Mitterrand believed the president and the first lady shared a house on the Left Bank. To hide Mazarine, his daughter by his mistress Anne Pingeot, a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, Mitterrand set up a vast and illicit eavesdropping apparatus that targeted politicians, lawyers, journalists and celebrities. He did not speak publicly about Mazarine until shortly before his death, by which time she was a university student. Most French people saw her for the first time when she appeared at his funeral. “I have had adventures,” Mitterrand told Magoudi.

“I was a rather handsome young man with a desire to seduce made all the more intense by the fact that, deep down, I wasn’t self-confident.” Comparing himself to Don Giovanni, he quipped that he had made fewer conquests than the “mille e tre” (1,003) attributed to the seducer in Mozart’s opera. “Of one thing I am certain: the arrival of my daughter, as I was getting close to the age of 60, threw me into the fountain of youth!” After Mazarine’s birth, the president confided, several friends had advised him to seek a discreet divorce. If he had refused to do so it was not to respect any familial or religious prohibition. Nor was it to bend to a conformism that would have stopped voters from supporting his presidential bid. “If I preferred this state of confusion and secrecy, it’s that I cannot resolve myself to leaving those I have loved. I don’t break with somebody. I add up.” Magoudi found himself entrusted with secrets and lies that, were they to become public, could have forced Mitterrand to abandon the presidency.

A coughing fit, prompted by a casual mention of the number 15, led to an abrupt confession about one of the most controversial incidents in Mitterrand’s political life. He confirmed that on the night of October 15, 1955, he had stage-managed an attempt on his own life — the machinegunning of his car south of the Luxembourg Gardens. Mitterrand always publicly denied any role in this attack, known as l’affaire de l’Observatoire, which had led to a scandal that cost him his parliamentary immunity and almost brought his political career to an end. It had been a time of rare tension, he explained to Magoudi, with French settlers in Algeria waging a violent campaign against anyone, like himself, who advocated dialogue with that colony’s independence movement. He had no regrets: it was the only way of obtaining police protection. Mitterrand returned again and again to his obsession with death. In one aside, while complaining that the Elysée Palace was too small, he said he had contemplated shifting the presidency to the sprawling Invalides complex by Napoleon’s tomb on the other side of the Seine.

“To get closer to the ashes of Napoleon would have amused me, but people would have called me a megalomaniac. I soon dropped the idea.” One morning, Magoudi found a message on his answerphone from Mitterrand, who told him that in the night he had suffered from stomach pains so virulent he feared he would die. Yet the doctor had told him the symptoms were purely psychological. “Ever since childhood, the idea of an imminent death seizes me sporadically,” the message ran. “In the lonely night I sometimes feel oppressed or seized by panic. Sometimes I am even terrified.” On a flight back to Paris from Vietnam in early 1993, according to Magoudi, the president called him aside and said: “The time has come. My end is near. I have a commission for you: write the psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand . . . Use everything I have confided to you . . . Do it for the 10th anniversary of my death.” Mitterrand’s presidency ended in 1995. He died the following year. Thatcher remembered him as “quieter, more urbane” than Jacques Chirac, his long-term rival and successor as president.

Chirac “had a sure grasp of detail and a profound interest in economics” while Mitterrand “was a self- conscious intellectual, fascinated by foreign policy and bored by detail and possibly contemptuous of economics”. “Oddly enough,” she wrote, “I liked them both.” Rendez-vous: La psychanalyse de François Mitterrand, by Ali Magoudi, is published on Friday by Maren Sell Editeurs, Paris Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2017. All Rights Reserved. Page generated in 0.2891 seconds. The world’s reaction: Opinions divided | The Economist purchase-rights icon BOTH loved and loathed at home, Margaret Thatcher stirred similarly polarised feelings abroad. They began across the Channel. In office she had a tricky time with French leaders, whatever their political stripe. François Mitterrand once said that she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula. Jacques Chirac, a former president on the right, was caught at a European summit declaring: “What more does that housewife want from me? My balls on a plate?” Such ambivalence underpinned the French reaction to her death.

François Hollande, the Socialist president, went for measured praise, saying she had a “frank and loyal” relationship with France. He singled out only one achievement: the decision to build the Channel tunnel. Mr Chirac issued a statement recognising “past disagreements” as well as “mutual respect”, and praised her “tenacity”. Le Figaro, a right-wing newspaper, lamented the absence in France of a leader like her; but the left erupted with an outpouring of bile. Libération in its front-page headline called her “The grim reaper”. As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the would-be revolutionary left, he tweeted that she would “discover in hell what she did to the miners” and called her simply “repulsive”. America, by contrast, showed rare bipartisanship. Politicians of right and left praised her for her record at home and abroad but also—unusually—hailed her as a spine-stiffening friend who had, at vital moments, nudged America to be true to itself. Foreign leaders are rarely accorded such memorials. In Republican memory Mrs Thatcher cannot be divided from Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement’s secular saint.

Her death prompted pride in the two friends’ parallel achievements, as political leaders who pulled their countries back from a sense of inevitable decline, and their joint triumphs, most notably in speaking useful truths about the cruelty and weakness of the communist system. But today’s Republican leaders, battered by election setbacks, also liked her prickly obduracy, and her disdain for the vagaries of opinion polls or headlines. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, drew particular comfort from her remark, “Defeat? I do not recognise the meaning of the word.” Democrats similarly dug into Mrs Thatcher’s record as a guide for their own party. They assumed that Reagan had won votes for his right-wing policies in the 1980s simply because of his avuncular charm; but Mrs Thatcher was also winning elections on a platform of free markets, a roll-back of union power and individual liberty, and she was both strident and deeply unpopular. What Mrs Thatcher exposed, said Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council that laid the groundwork for Bill Clinton’s dragging of his party towards the centre ground, was that “we were selling products nobody really wanted to buy.

They made us come up with our new ideas.” Those hoping that Hillary Clinton might make a run for the presidency in 2016—including, it seems, Barack Obama—talked wistfully about Mrs Thatcher’s breaking of glass ceilings. The point was made by women elsewhere. In Norway Siv Jensen, the steely blonde leader of the free-market Progress Party, lavished praise on Mrs Thatcher as her inspiration. And in South Korea Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female leader, who has been compared to Mrs Thatcher for years and has only encouraged the comparison, expressed “great sorrow” at her death. Mrs Park now faces her own Falklands moment with the growlings from Pyongyang; but it is Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, who has been more recently inspired by Thatcher the warrior, in his confrontation with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. He admitted being moved to tears by the scene in the film “The Iron Lady” where Mrs Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, speaks about the war in the House of Commons.

No such sentimentality coloured the reaction in China, though Mrs Thatcher is a hero to the ultra-liberals and is even viewed with some respect by mainstream academics linked to the government. Much of the press coverage focused on her contribution to the 1984 agreement that led to Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997. But Chinese newspapers noted her submission to China’s unbending will in 1982, when, emboldened by the Falklands victory, she tried to push China for a deal that would allow for a continued British role in Hong Kong after 1997. Deng Xiaoping firmly made it clear that this was unacceptable. She rapidly capitulated. The Beijing Times, a Chinese-language newspaper, in an online review of her career, included pictures of her fall down the steps of the Great Hall of the People after her rebuff by Chinese leaders. Global Times, an English-language newspaper with a nationalist bent, noted that since Mrs Thatcher left office there had been no more iron men or iron ladies—partly because of a “decline in European power”, which made it impossible to maintain so rigid a stance.

War and peace A rueful respect, with cautious use of words, characterised the reaction in the many countries and institutions that had had run-ins with Mrs Thatcher. In Brussels José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said she would be remembered for both her contributions to, and her reservations about, the European project. Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, noted that she had been a committed European “in the beginning”—without saying what she later became. In South Africa the ruling African National Congress (dismissed by Mrs Thatcher as a terrorist organisation), said it had been “on the receiving end of her policy”, and lamented her “failure to isolate apartheid” by agreeing to sanctions. In Russia, though Vladimir Putin, the president, paid tribute to her historic role, the obituaries were short and did not make the front pages. It was telling that Mikhail Gorbachev (a man whom Mrs Thatcher famously said she could do business with) wrote about her for Britain’s Guardian, rather than any Russian newspaper. Though Mrs Thatcher wowed the Russian intelligentsia on her visit to Moscow in 1987, she had no connection with, and stirs little interest in, Mr Putin’s Russia.

The fiercest comments of all came, unsurprisingly, from Argentina, the old enemy. There the Argentine Veterans’ Association condemned her as a warmonger, and a legislator for the opposition Peronist faction called her a “symbol of aggression, destruction and death”. The picture was barely softened by General Guillermo Garín, once a spokesman for Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military dictator in the 1980s. Pinochet, he noted, was “very fond of her”. François Mitterrand | Iconic Photos ( continued from yesterday ) On May 21, 1981, eleven days after his election, Francois Mitterrand officially took office as the French president. The day was marked by official ceremonies and public events. After the ritual wreath under the Arc de Triomphe, Mitterrand headed to Paris’ Left Bank for a new ceremony of his own: a pilgrimage to the Panthéon that was orchestrated to outdo Giscard’s farewell two days prior. The Pantheon, completed in 1789 – the year of the French Revolution, was a symbolic mausoleum to “receive the bodies of great men who died in the period of French liberty”.

Mitterrand entered the mausoleum holding a solitary rose — the symbol of the French socialists — as the Orchestre de Paris played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the background. The crowd outside and the TV viewers didn’t know that but the Pantheon had been turned into a studio for the occasion. Cameras greeted Mitterrand and followed his descent in the crypt. Artist Serge Moati was engaged to direct the entire sequence. Rehearsals, body doubles and props (for the flowers) were used. Shrewd video editing enabled Mitterrand to enter the Pantheon with a single rose but place three roses on three graves; as Pierre Mauroy, Mitterrand’s first prime minister, said: “The rose for Jean Jaures represented our heritage; it was for the man who knew how to mobilize the left. The rose for Jean Moulin was the man who was able to unite Frenchmen from all walks of life to resist the foreign invador.

The rose for Victor Schoelcher was the man who made of France the emancipator of peoples.” When Mitterrand emerged from the Panthéon to face a crowd of cheering young supporters brandishing red roses, he displayed the first smile of his inauguration day. A final flourish was provided by a rendition of the Marseillaise, exuberant post-Giscard tempo that has been personally prescribed by Mitterrand. But if Mitterrand’s election elated his supporters, it produced apprehension in the West and in certain areas of France. As Mitterrand entered the Pantheon, many Parisians frantically packed their bags to flee the impending socialist “campaign to out-Keynes even Keynes”. Hidden behind these fears was a deeper realization that France’s unparalleled economic prosperity of the last thirty years had ended. Only two years before, the demographer Fourastié eulogized the era by his neologism, Les Trente Glorieuses. Mitterrand’s election, in this sense, was as much a vote against incumbency as a profound soul-searching.

Yet, Mitterrand’s moderate supporters believed that he would take a far more centrist approach once in office but he went on with his most radical promises: he created 250,000 new government jobs, raised pay for government employees, shortened the workweek from 40 to 39 hours, added a fifth week of paid vacation, reduced the retirement age to 60, increased social payments through Allocations Familiales, and nationalized 38 banks and 7 industrial giants. The results were an unmitigated disaster. The budget deficit tripled; inflation and unemployment stood in double digits. Mitterrand had to devalue the franc no less than three times to keep France’s exports competitive. Following the time-honored traditions of French presidents, Mitterrand sacked his first ministry and embarked on one of the most extraordinary reversals of economic policy in modern history: he froze the budget in 1983 and held raises for public employees below the rate of inflation. Entitlement programs were rolled back, and labour rules that restricted private sector hirings were weakened.

By the mid-80s, the budget was back in balance, and inflation fell to around 4%, thanks to this reversal which Mitterrand called “La Rigueur,” or roughly “Austerity” in English. (Video of Mitterrand’s Pantheon Visit below; begins at 3:30 mark) Rate this: Mitterand’s wife Danielle stands on the far left, his mistress Anne Pingeot(second from right) and illegitimate daughter Mazarine (third from right) Anne and Mazarine François Mitterrand served as the President of France from 1981 to 1995, the first left-wing head of state since 1957 and the only member of the Socialist Party to be elected as the President of France. He also holds the record of the longest-serving (almost 14 years) President of France. At President Francois Mitterand’s funeral in 1996, his wife and his long term mistress stood side-by-side at the grave, accompanied by their respective legitimate and illegitimate children .

Although the press made no comment, the existence of his illegitimate daughter Mazarine was revealed by the popular magazine Paris-Match in 1994, just months before he left office. Mitterrand concealed the fact for years. For more details on sex life of French politicians, see Sexus Politicus (Dubois, Deloire), which premise is that in France, a successful politician is also a seductive politician. Prime Minister Edgar Faure mused when he gained the lofty title of “president of the Council,” “When I was a minister, some women resisted me. Once I became president, not even one.” President from 1895 to 1899, Félix Faure, who was not related, died in the bed of his mistress. De Gaulle was the only post-World War II French leader to maintain a strict military discipline over his personal life. Giscard d’Estaing claimed he had as many mistresses as the salons of Paris, and noted, “When I was president of the republic, I was in love with 17 million French women.

When I saw them in the crowd, they felt it and then they voted for me.” Rate this: with one comment Socialist French President François Mitterrand and conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Together, they were the titans of European and world politics in the 80s. Together, they harkened back to the era when the fate of the world was decided by the statesmen of Europe in her chancelleries. … and they didn’t get along well. Thatcher was taught as a child by her grocer father that the French were both Roman Catholic and Communist and riddled with sexual disease; Mitterand said that Margaret Thatcher had ‘the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. Thatcher’s finest European hour came in 1984 when she marched into Fontainebleau to demand the ‘British rebate’–66% rebate from the French and the Germans who wanted to give only 50%. However, these two statesmen accomplished one monumental project together: the Chunnel.

Thatcher said she had no objection to a privately funded project to bridge the English channel, and in 1981, Thatcher and Mitterrand agreed to set up a working group to look into a privately funded project. Four submissions were shortlisted and in 1986, the Eurotunnel bid was selected. Foreign Affairs Ministers of both countries signed the Franco-British Treaty in Canterbury, which was ratified in 1987 by Thatcher and Mitterrand (above) inside the famed Chapter House, in Canterbury Cathedral. The tunnel was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II and Mitterrand in a ceremony held in Calais on 6 May 1994. Rate this: Margaret Thatcher as Muse; Mixed Messages but No Love Letters in a London Exhibition - The New York Times The New York Times Arts |Margaret Thatcher as Muse; Mixed Messages but No Love Letters in a London Exhibition Search Continue reading the main story The best-known artistic depiction of Margaret Thatcher in recent years is a huge marble statue showing her standing magnificently erect, gripping her famous handbag.

This work was decapitated last year at the Guildhall Art Gallery by an anti-Thatcherite Londoner (''We can ill afford to ever lose our sense of humor,'' he said, before being sentenced to three months in prison), which is as telling a comment as any on the passions this former prime minister still stirs up here. Those feelings are on full display at the Blue Gallery in East London, where a new exhibition, simply called ''Thatcher,'' tries to plumb the enduring and still confounding mystique of a woman who has meant many things over the years but has still not loosened her iron hold on the British imagination. François Mitterrand once said of Lady Thatcher that ''she has the eyes of Caligula, but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe,'' but the works in the exhibition, which closes on Saturday, examine her from the perspective of hindsight, her power and her vibrancy diminished. In ''3 ft. Thatcher,'' for instance, the larger-than-life leader has been reduced to a tiny dull-eyed figure in a plain overcoat and humble head scarf.

In other works she is painted with a clown's mouth and nose, bearing a striking resemblance to Ronald McDonald; shown with her face stamped onto sheets of government-issue toilet paper; and depicted in sand, in a mixed media work that offers a kaleidoscope of images from the 1980's and concludes that she is ''already transformed into pixels of dust.'' Continue reading the main story Lady Thatcher is now 77, and more than a decade has passed since she was deposed as prime minister in a humiliating move by enemies from her own party. She is in frail health, and after she suffered the latest in a series of small strokes, her doctor advised her last year not to speak in public again. Advertisement Continue reading the main story But Lady Thatcher, who as recently as the last general election, in 2001, was still making front-page news every time she held forth on British politics, which was often, has not gone away. An audience of 3,000 executives recently gave her a rapturous and sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage at the Royal Albert Hall after a taped interview that revealed her to be as implacably self-assured in her beliefs as ever.

''She still has the power to provoke incredibly extreme feelings in people, which is very unusual in this country -- we're normally very unemotional about politicians,'' said Tara Howard, curator of the Blue Gallery show. (Lady Thatcher has not seen the exhibition, her office said.) ''She has this ability to get under people's skin, to be very, very provocative.'' Lady Thatcher was not regarded as a friend of artists during her premiership, although her love of market forces helped Young British Artists like Damien Hirst, with their emphasis on commercial savvy and clever self-promotion, flourish in London. It almost goes without saying that the 14 pieces in the show, which include sculptures, paintings, photographs and a video installation, take either a satirical or a negative view of Lady Thatcher. There are no outright love letters. But only a few pieces are blindly antagonistic. Some artists, including Wolfgang Tillmans and Matt Collishaw, refused to participate on the ground that their hatred of Lady Thatcher would have overridden their ability to produce thoughtful works, Ms. Howard said.

The 13 artists who did take part, including Keith Tyson and Martin Creed, both winners of the Turner Prize, created pieces that are funny, provocative, strange, affecting and full of mixed messages. Kenny Hunter, who has two statues in the exhibition -- ''3 ft. Thatcher'' and ''Home Guard,'' which shows a huge attack dog astride a map of the Falkland Islands -- grew up in Scotland, a bastion of the left where the prime minister was widely reviled. ''I entered the job market then, and just saw jobs evaporating,'' said Mr. Hunter, 41, adding that his ''heart sank'' when he first thought of making art inspired by her. But he found that his feelings had grown complicated over time and that he did not want, he said, to ''demonize or attack her,'' at least not completely. His ''3 ft. Thatcher'' was cast in resin mixed with coal dust, a reference to her successful attacks on the British coal industry and the closing of the coal mines; the tiny figure stands atop an oil drum, in a nod to the North Sea oil industry and a reminder of the importance of oil as a factor in political decisions. Mr.

Hunter's Thatcher is dressed (with handbag), to look like the grocer's daughter she was, but her stance, in a greatcoat with one arm outstretched in front of her, evokes monuments to Russian dictators, Nazi generals and, more recently, Saddam Hussein. ''I wanted it to have that same feel -- to look like a malignant dwarf that still had some residual power,'' Mr. Hunter said. ''The fact that I shrunk her to a small scale says to me that I've got over Thatcher, and there are new battles to fight.'' Advertisement Continue reading the main story As one looks at the art, it starts to become clear that the noise emanating from somewhere in the gallery background is Lady Thatcher's voice. Further exploration reveals it to come from a back room that houses Mark Wallinger's video installation, ''The Sleep of Reason,'' in which he has taken her stirring speech to the 1982 Conservative Party conference and edited it from blink to blink in her expression so it looks as though she is continuously asleep. ''She famously got by on so little sleep, and it's very hard to imagine Mrs. Thatcher having an unconscious life,'' Mr. Wallinger told The Guardian.

''I wanted to create the suggestion of sleep, to invade her privacy, to subject her to a different kind of scrutiny.'' Mr. Wallinger told the paper that he, too, was surprised that his feelings had softened over the years. ''It was a curious process to go back and look at her old speeches, because at that time I hated her,'' he said. ''It was different to look at her in retrospect. The speeches brought a tear to the eye. You could see her chipping away at human weakness and greed.'' Perhaps the most poignant image is a photograph taken by the artist Paul Graham in April 2002 at an event celebrating the publication of Lady Thatcher's latest book, ''Statecraft,'' an impassioned argument against Britain's continued membership in the European Union. It was the day, Ms. Howard said, that Lady Thatcher had been instructed to renounce public speaking, a terrible blow for a woman who has always thrived in the limelight. It is an enormous picture, with Lady Thatcher's image in the lower corner, surrounded by an expanse of black. She is heavily, almost garishly made up, her hair a shellacked helmet, her lips covered in shocking red.

She is looking down, and appears worn, distracted, old. ''She has almost gone,'' Michael Binyon wrote in The Times of London of this photograph. ''But her image lives on.'' ‘If you want anything said, ask Mrs Thatcher’ | OxfordWords blog Home > ‘If you want anything said, ask Mrs Thatcher’ ‘If you want anything said, ask Mrs Thatcher’ In May 1979 the United Kingdom elected its first female Prime Minister, in spite of her own comment ten years earlier: ‘No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary—not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn’t want to be Prime Minister. You have to give yourself 100%’. A few years later, having become Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went on to say ‘In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman’. In fact, the things she said were so memorable that she has become one of the most quoted politicians of modern times.

Most people recognize ‘there is no real alternative’, ‘the lady’s not for turning’, ‘the Falklands Factor’, ‘Rejoice, rejoice!’, ‘Victorian values’, ‘We can do business together’, and ‘There is no such thing as Society’. Society and the environment Like many frequently quoted individuals, some of her sayings have been ‘improved’ over time in the public mind. It is fairly well known that ‘There is no such thing as Society’ was originally followed by the comment ‘There are individual men and women, and there are families’. ‘Rejoice, rejoice!’ is an abbreviation of ‘Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our armed forces and the Marines. Rejoice!’. ‘The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’ started life as ‘Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money’ – a much less memorable line.

And ‘It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment’ has recently been shown to derive from a copy-editor’s memory of a speech not reported at the time: ‘What really thrilled me, having spent so much of my lifetime in Parliament, and talking about things like inflation, Social Security benefits, housing problems, environmental problems and so on, is that when it really came to the test, what’s thrilled people wasn’t those things, what thrilled people was once again being able to serve a great cause, the cause of liberty’. This is an ex-parrot! She has never been noted for her sense of humour – there is the story of how the Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch had to be explained to her – and the comic aspect of some of her sayings is usually unconscious. One thinks of ‘I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, as long as they do what I say’, ‘We have become a grandmother’, and, at a farewell dinner for William Whitelaw (her Deputy Prime Minister between 1979 and 1988), ‘Every Prime Minister needs a Willie’.

The handbag But apart from her own contributions to dictionaries of quotations, Margaret Thatcher has inspired many others, both friend and foe. It was a Soviet newspaper which first called her ‘the iron lady’. The Labour politician Barbara Castle summed her up on the very day she was elected leader of her party: ‘She is so clearly the best man among them’. Another Labour opponent, Denis Healey, quoted her own backbenchers as describing her as ‘the Great She-elephant, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the Catherine the Great of Finchley’, while it was his wife Edna who memorably summed her up as having ‘no hinterland; in particular she has no sense of history’. However, it was a Conservative who fixed one of the most enduring images associated with the Thatcher years, when Julian Critchley said in 1982 ‘She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag’. The verb ‘to handbag’ meaning ‘to verbally attack or crush ruthlessly and forcefully’ has since entered the dictionary. Caligula or Marilyn Monroe? Images of her determination and strength are repeated over and over again.

The French President François Mitterrand briefed his European Minister Roland Dumas that ‘She has the eyes of Caligula , but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe ’. On her final downfall, the Conservative MP John Biffen described her as ‘a tigress surrounded by hamsters’. But perhaps most evocative is the response from Lord Carrington during the Falklands War: when asked ‘If Mrs Thatcher were run over by a bus…?’, his reply was ‘It wouldn’t dare’. This article originally appeared on the OUPblog. The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press. Author

Question: About which British politician did Francois Mitterrand say, "She has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula?"
Answer: Margaret Thatcher